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Packstack: Create a proof of concept cloud

Packstack is an OpenStack deployment tool intended to install Proof of Concept small environments in a quick and easy way using the RDO distribution on a CentOS Stream hosts. Production features such as High Availability, OpenStack upgrades or other day-2 operations are out of the scope of Packstack. For these cases, you can rely on other recommended tools described in Deploy RDO section.

This document shows how to spin up a proof of concept cloud on one node using the Packstack installation utility.

These instructions apply to the following Release and Operating Systems - Antelope, Bobcat and Caracal on CentOS Stream 9.

WARNING

Read this document in full, then choose your install path: - Summary for the impatient - Step by step instruction

Don't just start typing commands at Summary for the impatient and proceed downwards through the page.

Summary for the impatient

If you are using non-English locale make sure your /etc/environment is populated:

LANG=en_US.utf-8
LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8

If your system meets all the prerequisites mentioned below, proceed with running the following commands.

  • On CentOS Stream 9:
$ sudo dnf update -y;
  sudo dnf config-manager --enable crb;
  sudo dnf install -y centos-release-openstack-caracal;
  sudo setenforce 0;
  sudo dnf update -y;
  sudo dnf install -y openstack-packstack;
  sudo packstack --allinone

Note for RHEL: Although it is expected that RDO works fine on RHEL, it is currently not tested in RHEL OS.

Step by step instruction

Step 0: Prerequisites

Software

CentOS Stream 9 is the minimum recommended version, or the equivalent version of one of the RHEL-based Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Scientific Linux, and so on. Packages are provided for x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le architectures although most of the testing is done on x86_64.

Hardware

Machine with at least 16GB RAM, processors with hardware virtualization extensions, and at least one network adapter.

Hostname

Name the host with a fully qualified domain name rather than a short-form name to avoid DNS issues with Packstack. FQDN can be defined by command:

$ sudo hostnamectl set-hostname [hostname.domain]

example:

$ sudo hostnamectl set-hostname packstack-host.example.com

Network

If you plan on having external network access to the server and instances, this is a good moment to properly configure your network settings. A static IP address to your network card, and disabling NetworkManager are good ideas.

Disable firewalld and NetworkManager

$ sudo systemctl disable firewalld;
  sudo systemctl stop firewalld;
  sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager;
  sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager;
  sudo systemctl enable network;
  sudo systemctl start network

Step 1: Software repositories

On CentOS Stream 9, first you need to enable the crb. Then, the extras-common repository provides the RPM that enables the OpenStack repository. It is enabled by default on CentOS Stream 9, so you can simply install the RPM to set up the OpenStack repository:

$ sudo dnf config-manager --enable crb
$ sudo dnf install -y centos-release-openstack-caracal

Update your current packages:

$ sudo dnf update -y

Looking for an older version? See http://rdoproject.org/repos/ for the full listing.

Step 2: Install Packstack Installer

$ sudo dnf install -y openstack-packstack

Step 3: Disable selinux enforcing mode

There are known issues with selinux policies and rabbitmq in CentOS Stream 9. Disable selinux enforcing mode:

$ sudo setenforce 0

Step 4: Run Packstack to install OpenStack

Packstack takes the work out of manually setting up OpenStack. It provides a set of options to specify the desired services and configurations for each installation. You can list all the available parameters using:

$ packstack --help

For a simple, single node OpenStack deployment with default options, run the following command:

$ sudo packstack --allinone

The Packstack command line interface accepts an answers file as a mechanism to specify the parameters. The base answers file can be created with:

$ packstack --gen-answer-file

Then can be used by using --answer-file option:

$ sudo packstack --answer-file=<path to the answers file>

If you have run Packstack previously, there will be a file in your home directory named something like packstack-answers-20130722-153728.txt You will probably want to use that file again, using the --answer-file option, so that any passwords you have already set (for example, mysql) will be reused.

The installer will ask you to enter the root password for each host node you are installing on the network, to enable remote configuration of the host so it can remotely configure each node using Puppet.

Once the process is complete, you can log in to the OpenStack web interface Horizon by going to http://$YOURIP/dashboard. The user name is admin. The password can be found in the file keystonerc_admin in the /root directory of the control node.